


Crack-Up

by a_hand_outstretched



Series: Crack-Up [1]
Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Alcohol, Depression, F/M, Self-Harm, Teetering on the edge of inappropriate sibling behavior, mostly shiv's thoughts, post-season two mandatory family christmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:48:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28421217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_hand_outstretched/pseuds/a_hand_outstretched
Summary: After botching both her career in politics and her chance at running the company, Shiv is directionless and depressed. Merry fucking Christmas.
Relationships: Kendall Roy/Siobhan "Shiv" Roy, Siobhan "Shiv" Roy/Tom Wambsgans
Series: Crack-Up [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2165385
Comments: 10
Kudos: 17





	Crack-Up

_ I can tell you've cracked   
_ _ Like a china plate _

They’re planning to spend three days at her mother’s house for Christmas. It seems to Shiv that the journey there alone takes three years. It’s freezing when they leave New York, and it’s sleeting when they land in England, and everything is so grey it seems neither day nor night. The sleeping pills she took on the plane are still weighing her down, making her doze off and on. When she’s awake the warm air in the car and curving roads make her feel queasy. She presses her face into Tom’s shoulder and takes slow breaths through her mouth. 

Tom is painfully, purposefully cheerful the whole time, chatting with the driver, excited for this ridiculous holiday arrangement. What does he expect? That the Christmas spirit will spark some maternal instinct in Caroline, that it’ll make her brothers less douchey, that they’ll all be happy together, drinking mulled wine and caroling with the neighbors? She almost smiles at the image. Then she imagines ordering him out of the car, leaving him in some wet field somewhere. He’d probably show up at home eventually, like dogs do sometimes when their owners abandon them. That’s what Tom’s love is like, she thinks, closing her eyes again. A muddy golden retriever in your living room. 

Shiv’s right hand is carefully positioned so her fingers can reach into her left jacket sleeve. Every few minutes, her nails scrape over the raw skin under her watch band. She’s not a basket case, she never breaks the skin — not on purpose, anyway. She’s passed it off as an eczema flare up to Tom and her manicurist, worn long sleeves to her last few therapy appointments. Right now it’s nothing. It doesn’t mean anything until someone else makes it mean something, and she’ll deal with that when it comes. 

When she and Tom finally arrive at her mother’s house, they’re greeted at the door by an already-drunk Roman. He’s barefoot and wearing a Santa hat. 

“Ho, ho, ho, hoe!” he yells, giving her an aggressive hug-shove. 

“Hey. Merry, you know, whatever,” Shiv says, pushing past him. 

Caroline coos something from the kitchen and Tom cocks his head, waiting for instructions. “You go,” Shiv tells him, flicking her wrist in the direction of her mother’s voice. She’s still got one hand on the handle of her suitcase. “Isn’t there anyone to…?” 

“You know how Mummy feels about staff, Siobhan.” Only for special occasions. Apparently family Christmas isn’t one of those. Roman’s putting on a pitch perfect imitation of their mother’s voice. “Come join the pity party in the lounge.” 

She leaves the suitcase at the bottom of the stairs and follows her brother. A pop mashup of several different Christmas songs is blasting from a room at the end of the hallway. Roman starts singing along, badly, as they enter the room. Kendall, who’d refused to say for sure whether or not he was coming for Christmas, is stretched out on the couch with a pillow over his face. Roman waltzes over and rips it off. 

“Fuck off to the North Pole, you demented fucking elf,” Kendall mumbles. He reaches around for the glass sitting on the floor next to the couch. There’s an open bottle of whiskey on the coffee table next to a pile of various candies. Wrappers litter the floor. The Christmas tree in the corner is wrapped in so much tinsel she can hardly see the branches. 

“Wow, this is fucking bleak,” Shiv says. A couple of days here and they’ve gone feral. 

“Candy cane?” Kendall asks, speaking loudly over the music. 

“Turn that shit off, Rome.” 

He mimics her in a stupid voice but he turns the music down. Kendall throws the candy cane at her. It hits her in the chest and falls to the floor. She’s still wearing her coat and scarf. It’s chilly and damp in the room, like it is everywhere in her mother’s house, but she’s uncomfortable in so many layers. She quickly pulls them off and piles everything on a chair by the door. 

“So, this is all you’ve been doing?” she asks them. 

Roman groans. “Yesterday we went to Great Aunt Lois’s, you remember her gross little dogs? They fucking attacked me. Look, look at this shit,” he’s pulling up his pant leg and showing her what looks to be a very small scratch, “So I am not doing shit for the next two days. You can be Mom’s token child at the next gathering of the decrepits.” 

“Where’s Tom?” Kendall asks. 

“I sent him in to deal with Mom.” He whistles in mock sympathy and Shiv cracks a smile. “How’s she been?” 

Kendall shrugs and pops a hard candy in his mouth. “The usual.” 

Since this seems to be it in terms of holiday festivities, Shiv resigns herself to the situation and moves to join them. Roman’s taken up a spot on the floor, sitting cross legged by the tree. Shiv plops down on top of Kendall’s bare feet, which he then moves to put in her lap. “Gross,” she says, flicking an ankle, but she lets them stay. It’s actually kind of nice, their weight on her thighs, not that she’d ever admit it. People tend to steer clear of Siobhan Roy’s personal space, consciously or not. Friends don’t casually drape their arms around her shoulders, her personal trainer’s hands hover a few inches away when pointing out a flaw in her form, one-night-stands don’t presume to fall asleep with an arm draped over her stomach. Even Tom, especially Tom, walks on eggshells around her most of the time. 

Ken and Rome don’t respect her boundaries, and she doesn’t give a shit about theirs. It’s… nice, in their own fucked up way. Maybe she should throw her therapist a bone and bring that up in their next session. The mutual assurance of, no matter what terrible things they do to each other, nothing will ever really change between them. Maybe that’s what family is — something beyond rational consequences. 

“Honey!” Tom calls from the hallway. Shiv drops her head back on the couch. “Caroline wanted me to tell you guys that dinner’s at eight tonight. I think she’s making goose? It looked fowl-y.” 

“Oh goodie, I was just wishing I felt more nauseous,” Roman says. 

Tom is standing awkwardly in the doorway and Shiv is looking at him upside down over the back of the couch, her chin stuck up in the air. What’s he waiting for? 

“Uh, I was just thinking, that I might, maybe, catch some shut eye, for a bit, if you don’t mind, babe.” 

“Sure. Whatever.” He retreats upstairs, and she wonders what Caroline said to so thoroughly break his holiday spirit. She feels a rare sliver of admiration for her mother. 

“That man really can’t take a shit without your sign off, can he?” Kendall says. Shiv rolls her eyes. As if he isn’t whipped from the first minute any woman shows him an ounce of affection. 

She reaches for the glass in his hand, takes it out of his loose grip. She opens her mouth to say something mean about the fact that she’s the only one bringing a partner to Christmas, but for some reason what comes out instead is, “He won’t stop hinting that we should have a baby.” 

“Don’t be disgusting, it’s Christmas,” Roman chimes in from the floor, where he’s halfway through peeling the glittery paint off an ornament. 

She tries to laugh but it sounds strangled. Kendall’s looking at her, bemused. She grimaces, says more quietly, “Can you fucking imagine?” and quickly takes a sip of the drink to distract herself. She almost spits it out. “Oh, Christ, where did you get this?” she asks, but she takes another large gulp, then decides to knock back the rest. It’s cheap shit, nothing her mother would stock. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and leans forward to refill the glass. 

The three of them sit like that for a while, she and Ken passing the glass back and forth, Roman flitting around the room like a disgruntled cat, trying to get them to play various drinking games, recounting low points of past Christmases. She’s sucking on a hard candy now too, the inside of her mouth coated in sugar and dulling the burn of the whiskey. 

She’s drunk enough to laugh when Roman brings up the miserable Christmas they spent in Hawaii, the first year after their parents’ divorce. Another pointless, petty family holiday. She’d forgotten about it. That was the time she got stung by a sea urchin. She’d been stuck in her room for days with a red, swollen foot. At first she basked in the glow of Logan’s attention, enjoyed being doted on in bed, but then her brothers began reporting everything she missed out on during their trips out of the house, the stories getting grander and grander each day until she was stewing in jealousy. On Christmas Eve, neither pleading from the nanny nor yelling from her father could make her hobble down the stairs for their annual family portrait. After more than an hour of slammed doors and back and forth, her brothers crept into her room where she was pouting in bed, their formal wear askew from the wait — bowties undone and Roman's hair sticking up in every direction. Kendall nudged Roman toward her. 

"I made up the thing about the dolphins," he admitted, throwing himself across on her bed dramatically, "and the thing about the Spice Girls." Shiv whacked him on the side of the head and he retaliated with a kick in her direction.

"I knew it," she said, "I could tell you were lying the whole time." 

"No you didn't!" Roman insisted, flailing as she tried to hit him again and bumping into her sore foot accidentally. 

Kendall hung back in the doorway. He watched them fight with a lopsided smile. "Roman actually missed you a little," he said.

"Shut up. Only because you're the most boring person alive," Roman said to Kendall. Then he turned back to Shiv, whining, "Will you pluh-eeze stop being a brat now? Dad says none of us are getting presents if you don't take the picture and I think he really means it this time." 

In retrospect the whole ordeal seems hilarious — Roman is recounting it like it was some formative trial they suffered, and all she can do is laugh and when she tries to stop, to contribute to the conversation, sharp giggles escape her mouth instead of words. It's a foreign feeling, to laugh like this, like she means it. 

“Maybe if Ken here hadn’t been attempting to drown the spare heirs in the Pacific we all would have had a merry time," Roman says, still overly serious. 

“Uh huh, well, I’m sorry my childcare standards weren’t up to par at 14, Rome.” 

“I’m just saying, it’s shocking we survived all those years of parental negligence. I mean, where was the fucking nanny?” 

“Shiela the slut,” Shiv gets out, before gulping down another laugh. 

“What?” Roman asks. 

“Dad was fucking the nanny. They left us with the housekeeper that morning,” she explains. 

Kendall nods. “I remember you bawling when it happened, Rome. You thought Shiv was going to die,” he says, laughing. 

Roman’s shakes his head and abruptly stops pacing around the room. “No way. She was the one crying. You had to carry her back to the house, right? We forgot her shoes?” 

“No, I had to carry you back, you were hysterical. Shiv was fine, she just waited at the beach.” 

“What?!” Roman says, indignant, at the same time Shiv says, “You just left me there?” 

“Well, obviously it worked out,” Kendall says. He moves one of his feet from her lap so he can nudge her once-stung foot. “It seems fine to me.” 

Roman frowns, but doesn’t argue. Shiv tries to remember what actually happened, but she can only picture the days that followed, not the urchin incident itself. She thought Logan had been the one to carry her back to the house, but maybe it was Kendall, or someone else. They drop the subject. 

A few refills later, Kendall forgets to give her the glass of whiskey back. Without thinking, she reaches out her hand, palm up, to make a grabbing gesture at him. She sees Kendall clock the state of her wrist and fights the urge to jerk it back. Maybe she overdid it today, in the car. There are a few flecks of dried blood on her watch band. A long beat passes and she braces for his concern. But Kendall just sets the glass in her palm. He doesn’t say anything. Shiv turns her attention back to Roman, who is humming the chorus of “Wonderful Christmastime” over and over as he lies flat on the floor with his stupid hat pulled over his eyes.

“You know, I’ve missed you,” Kendall says then, his voice serious, if slightly slurred. She sputters, almost spits out the drink. Her surprise turns into laughter. 

“I saw you at Connor’s thing like, a month ago,” she says. 

“No, no,” he shakes his head slowly, like he’s explaining something to a child. “I’ve missed you. ” 

“Shut up,” she says, reflexively. She doesn’t even know what he’s saying, it’s just drunken bullshit, but her chest is suddenly tight. She squeezes a hand around his calf muscle. “What do you mean, you miss me? We’re together all the fucking time.” 

“Most of the time… you’re… you’re different. You’re…” he pauses, “It’s just… sometimes I worry...” He cuts himself off and bounces his foot in her lap. “Don’t you ever miss us?” 

It’s so stupid, but Shiv is suddenly terrified she’ll start crying. The threat is there, she can feel the pressure behind her eyes. Fuck him for faking her out like that, slipping the knife in when she wasn’t looking. She can’t talk. 

If she was interested in being honest, she’d tell him it feels like she’s been pushed out on an ice floe to die. She hasn’t been working for nearly a year. There’s no structure to her life. It doesn’t matter that she can’t tell what time it is, she doesn’t need to know. Gil won the election, Waystar didn’t implode, and neither of these things was thanks to her. They could have been, if she hadn’t fucked everything up, cowered when she should have fought. And no one will even admit that she’s done so, that she’s damaged goods. They just ignore her when they can, make polite small talk when they can’t. 

But she’s not interested in being honest, or in asking how he did it, how he crawled out from under all this. Because even if he’s not exactly happy, he seems whole, in a way he never was before. She can’t stomach what that might mean for her. 

“Hey. C’mere,” Kendall says to her, propping himself up a little bit. Probably because he can tell she’s about to start bawling, damn it. 

“Ugh, if you two start making out I’m telling Mom,” Roman says from the floor, lifting the fuzzy edge of his hat to peer at them. 

“C’mere, Romey,” Kendall says, stretching his arms out to him instead. Roman stands, wobbly, and for a split second Shiv thinks he is actually going to get on the couch with them. And then she remembers the day on the beach — Kendall’s panic, because he hadn’t been watching them and they were both crying and he thought they were both hurt, and how she screamed at him when he picked up Roman instead of her, because he was louder and smaller — and she realizes she’s never really seen her brothers before. Not with any clarity, for all the times she thought she was being objective about them.

“Nope, I’m out,” Roman declares. He presses a kiss to the crown of Kendall’s head with an exaggerated smooch sound. “Tell Mom I’m dead or something, I’m not doing dinner. Merry fucking Christmas.” 

He leaves the room. Kendall and Shiv are both quiet for a few minutes. She listens to his even breathing. She wants to say, you tried, didn’t you? She wants to tell him that she sees him now. But what comes out instead is: “Would you ever do that?” 

“Do what?” he asks. 

“Nothing, never mind.” She’s too drunk and too close to him and too worked up about nothing. Her mouth feels tacky from the candy.

“Kiss you?”

She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t look at him. She turns the empty glass around and around in her hands. 

“I would. If you wanted that.” He sounds certain, almost dismissive. Shiv’s stomach lurches like she’s in free fall. 

“What if I wanted…” She grasps for the end of the sentence, doesn’t know how to put what she wants into words. Maybe she wants him to hurt her, or take something from her, to prove that he can and that she’s worth the trouble. Or maybe she wants reassurance, a hug from her big brother. Or maybe something else entirely. 

She dares a look at him. His brow is creased; he’s studying her, but his eyes are hazy from the alcohol. “If you asked me to, yeah.” 

Shiv sniffles and tucks her hair behind her ears, trying to get her voice under control, so she can sound casual and not like she’s lost at sea and desperately waving her arms around for some kind of rescue. From Kendall, of all people. “I didn’t say what it is.” 

He shrugs and gives her a small smile. 

Shiv lets the glass slip from her fingers. It falls to the floor with a crack. Her face crumples up and she climbs over him so she can lay her head on his chest. She is crying now, choking off sobs, and he tentatively pats her back. He’s radiating warmth and she burrows into it, wraps her arms around his torso so the tips of her fingers are just grazing the skin at the back of his neck. 

“Shiv...”

“I’m sorry — sorry — I’m just tired,” is all she can say, even though it sounds weak — a shitty, lazy excuse. But it’s true. She just wants to give in for a few minutes. 

“I know,” Kendall mumbles. He tightens his hold on her. 

It’s dark outside the windows. It must be nearly time for dinner. Tom will be coming back downstairs soon. She wonders what he’d say if he found them lying like this. 

He probably wouldn’t say anything at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Title/lyrics from a Fleet Foxes song.


End file.
